Any help you can give me on what you mean by the word would be appreciated. Is it the same as the "basic beliefs" in Plantinga's argument?
Probably - a lot of definitions of "basic beliefs" do refer to them as axioms of a philosophical belief system - but I hesitate to be more definite about it than that because Plantinga is such an obscurantist that it can be difficult to tell what he's on about. His attempt to rescue the ontological proof (so-called) by restating it in terms of probability theory is a classic case in point. I certainly wouldn't want you to assume that his epistemology is the same as mine.
So you basically said "this is driving me so crazy that I'd rather start believe it even if it isn't so than deny it and be driven crazy by it?"
No. I believe, and if I understood Renford Bambrough correctly he believed, that if we are unable to deny a belief and still function in the world, then we know that belief to be true as well as it is possible to know anything to be true (because all other beliefs are ultimately derived from beliefs that we know to be true on that basis). So what I said to myself would have been more along the lines of "Denying this is driving me so crazy that I am justified in treating it as something I know to be true."
Sure, that's fine; the participants don't need to resolve those things in order to reason about whether the tea will stain the carpet, and that's why it's where I think we should start.
I can't quite imagine how that would work, but I'm willing to try, provided we agree not to let it end in mutual recriminations when we inevitably discover that we never meant the same thing by "tea", "carpet" and "stain" in the first place (or, even more likely, by "will").
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timeasmymeasure
no subject
Date: 2009-01-08 04:40 pm (UTC)Probably - a lot of definitions of "basic beliefs" do refer to them as axioms of a philosophical belief system - but I hesitate to be more definite about it than that because Plantinga is such an obscurantist that it can be difficult to tell what he's on about. His attempt to rescue the ontological proof (so-called) by restating it in terms of probability theory is a classic case in point. I certainly wouldn't want you to assume that his epistemology is the same as mine.
So you basically said "this is driving me so crazy that I'd rather start believe it even if it isn't so than deny it and be driven crazy by it?"
No. I believe, and if I understood Renford Bambrough correctly he believed, that if we are unable to deny a belief and still function in the world, then we know that belief to be true as well as it is possible to know anything to be true (because all other beliefs are ultimately derived from beliefs that we know to be true on that basis). So what I said to myself would have been more along the lines of "Denying this is driving me so crazy that I am justified in treating it as something I know to be true."
Sure, that's fine; the participants don't need to resolve those things in order to reason about whether the tea will stain the carpet, and that's why it's where I think we should start.
I can't quite imagine how that would work, but I'm willing to try, provided we agree not to let it end in mutual recriminations when we inevitably discover that we never meant the same thing by "tea", "carpet" and "stain" in the first place (or, even more likely, by "will").